It makes me gasp instinctively for breath, the thought of 33 bodies entombed more than half a kilometre beneath a dry, menacing desert in South America. For two months I have pictured these men measuring their days in droplets of sweat, warding off the terrors that fill their perpetual, enfolding nights.
I have pushed away thoughts of a Lord of the Flies scenario, where primitive instinct overrides moral rectitude, an outcome so easily enacted in a place from which escape is impossible and to which help cannot be easily dispatched.
Surely mine was not the only pulse that faltered when , not long after their discovery, one of the miners refused to speak into a camera that had been lowered into the cavern? He was too shy, his workmates laughed uneasily; they would speak on his behalf instead. I silently hoped that his family would insist on seeing evidence of his wellbeing, as the loved-ones of hostages are wont to do.
As the miners incubated and festered in their hell-hole, so their legend grew. Now, as they prepare to return to the surface, their aura thrums with a mysterious, murky undercurrent. 'Things went on down there which will never be spoken of. They have taken a pledge of silence,' said the wife of one of the miners.
These men will have the eyes of the world on them as, one-by-one, they are drawn upwards through 700 m of dense, compressed earth. The capsule in which they ride will represent freedom, but it will also reinforce the might of the earthly straightjacket into which they have been crammed these past months.
I have journeyed in one of these capsules myself, as a young journalist working in Johannesburg, a city set on a vast basin of gold. At a vacant plot on the East Rand, where mine dumps rise like hillocks from the bland, dun-coloured landscape, the Chamber of Mines was showcasing this clever mine rescue device. They had drilled a hole into a shaft perhaps 100 or 200 m below the surface, and had set up the contraption with its scaffolding and pulleys and other cleverly-engineered rigging.
Although the South African mining industry placed tremendous emphasis on safety, injury and death were considered inherent to deep level